It'll Be Alright on the Night

British tv show which shows endless clips of celebrities, newsreaders and politicians making mistakes, fluffing lines, dropping things, falling over, etc etc etc.

The clips are usually funny once, but as the shows are repeated constantly, they get very tiresome. Ironically, any celebrities featured get paid repeat fees, with the result that they could end up getting paid more for fucking it up than they would for getting their lines right.

Hosted by Denis Norden who, along with Jeremy Beadle and all other clip show hosts, seems to think that we want to listen to crap jokes in between clips.

Still, although it is terribly hackneyed now, this was actually the first ever incarnation of the outtakes format, which is sold all around the world. The creation of the show was amazingly fast. Norden came up with the idea in a studio canteen one day, phoned up Michael Grade, and got a meeting immediately. Norden told him the idea, and Grade asked how quickly he could have it - and that was it. Norden chooses all the clips himself, writes the show, and won't show a clip if the audience laughter is malicious. And even though I've just slagged it off for several paragraphs, if it's on and I see a clip, I'll usually laugh and start watching. Damn you, Norden!

The best clip I ever saw was of a man with a shockingly obvious comb-over hairstyle being interviewed. The wind kept whipping the comb-over off his head, so that it flapped around his ear, and he kept putting it back and pretending nothing was out of the ordinary. I have nearly died several times laughing at this clip, it sums up all that is ridiculous about this country. Dude! We can SEE the hair coming away! We know you're bald! Give it up!

Note for Americans: this is what you would call a blooper show, and Denis Norden is an older, less annoying version of Bob Saget. For some reason we don't call them bloopers here in England, although the BBC has a show called Auntie's Bloomers - Auntie is the affectionate term for the BBC that nobody except the BBC actually uses, and bloomers are old women's big knickers, here referring to mistakes. You know, when you explain it, it just sounds weird...

Useless Trivia Fact: Rod Argent, who co-wrote the theme music (as mentioned in the writeup below), was one of the members of The Zombies, of She's Not There and Time of the Season fame. I remember being quite shocked to see his name in the credits, and looked him up to see if it was him. It was (and is). That's showbiz, I guess.

'It'll Be Alright on the Night' is a British television programme broadcast by ITV, traditionally on Saturday evenings. It is semi-regular, with new episodes appearing once or twice a year. It is frequently repeated because it is a popular way to fill up an hour, and the blizzard of blips mean that it's hard for the audience to tell whether they have seen the episode before. It has been broadcast since 1977 and takes the format of an hour of televisual and cinematic out-takes, presented by Denis Norden who, despite his name, is not French.

The out-takes concentrates on the following hardy perennials:

- British sit-coms
- American news programmes
- Non-English language light entertainment programmes, often involving odd-looking people being un-naturally happy in Czech.

The show is not to be confused with Denis Norden's Laughter File, which is a collection of quirky clips in the mould of similar programmes featuring Clive James and Chris Tarrant (all of which rely heavily on the old Japanese perennial 'Endurance'). It's odd that these programmes are all presented by genuinely intelligent, professional people; presumably you have to have a passion for television to muster believable excitement when presenting shots of newsreaders getting their own names wrong. When clip shows are presented by jobbing presenters the results are usually disastrous; Shane Richie's 'Caught in the Act' is a good example.

IBAOTN's format is quite simple, despite which the programme has been a consistent ratings-winner. Essentially, Norden stands alone on a large, hi-tech stage and delivers a few jokes, after which five or six clips are shown, usually with a uniting theme to them (news reporters falling over, for example, or standing in the surf as the tide comes in). This cycle is repeated, with gaps for commercials, until the programme ends. After that, ITV shows more programmes, each one broken up with commercials, until the next edition of It'll Be Alright on the Night is broadcast.

There are occasional special editions - the last was an election-night special broadcast in 2001, consisting of election-related mistakes. A 25th anniversary special was broadcast in 2002, although there was no attempt at tying the contents of the programme in with the jubilee theme.

The saxophone-led theme music - along with Norden, one of the series' constants - was written by Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke.

As mentioned in the previous write-up, many clips are repeated between programmes. Classics include:

- An American newsdesk: "Hi, my name's X", "And my name's Y", (pause), "No, no it's not, it's Z";
- An old American man telling a reporter, repeatedly and hilariously, that he doesn't know what's going on, he just doesn't know;
- An Australian person who placed a classified ad for his house in the local paper specifying that he didn't want any enquiries from agents, but the newspaper printed it as 'asians', to great hilarity and embarrassment;
- "Colin Baker*, for Thames News, Westminster, soaked, with cold feet, and an aching heart, married, several children, pissed off, really dreadfully pissed off";
- A female singer being attacked by a monkey.

* Not to be confused with 'Doctor Who' Colin Baker; this is a different Colin Baker, a heavyweight news reporter.